


If only it was that easy to die

by magicspaghetti



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anorexia, Child Abuse, Indian Harry Potter, Not for children, One Shot, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Trauma, turning punishments into coping strategies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:22:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28383174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicspaghetti/pseuds/magicspaghetti
Summary: As Hari sat in the cupboard under the stairs, cobwebs of blood drawn across his bones, he wondered not for the first time, when he’d taken his punishments and turned them into coping mechanisms.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 42





	If only it was that easy to die

**Author's Note:**

> This is a vent fic, written in my preferred style of prose fiction. This fic is not part of the "Hari Potter: A Childhood of Love and War" series, and the Hari presented here is not the same Hari as in those fics. My mental health is falling to shit, my eating disorder is back in the danger zone, my friends have abandoned me, and I'm moving to a whole other state to escape my abusive family. This fic is definitely triggering as hell so please be careful about reading it if you're not in a good mindset. Anyway, that's enough of my rambling, I hope you enjoy (in a twisted kind of way) this fic.

A four year-old boy had no business being as clumsy as Hari. His tawny skin might hide the bruises better than Dudley’s pale skin would, but it didn’t hide the accretion of scars all along his legs and ankles. He’d been told so often that the rocks and shoes aimed at his ankles were nothing but his clumsiness, that the times he’d felt a fist against his back shoving him into some conglomeration of sharp things was just him trying to pass off his clumsiness as someone else’s malice, that he’d begun to believe it himself.

“My name is Hari Potter,” he whispered to the council of spiders watching him from the underside of the stairs that formed his room, “and I am a clumsy little boy. I will never be a good boy until I learn not to be clumsy”

The spiders never said a word, never blinked, never cried. But they watched that little boy, as he comforted his breaking body with lies he no longer recognised as untruths.

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Hari was the only one who did the gardening during the day. After dusk, Aunt Petunia would come outside and point at all the trampled offcuts, all the dead leaves and leftover fertiliser left in piles as Hari worked. “Such a simple job,” she said, her voice mournful. “And you can’t even do that. What can you do, boy?”

Hari thought that perhaps once all he could do was cry, but now he couldn’t even do that. He truly couldn’t do a thing.

Uncle Vernon loved to remind him of his purpose, and he couldn’t even do that. “Sit still, boy” he snarled, once he’d dragged Hari back inside. “Don’t you know all you’re good for is a punching bag?”

Sometimes Hari wondered if maybe this wasn’t normal. If maybe his neighbours would care, maybe his teachers would take him in, like Miss Honey in Matilda. He liked to pretend he was Matilda sometimes, and his Aunt and Uncle were somehow both the Wormwoods and Miss Trunchbull. But there was never a Miss Honey, and there was never a Lavender. Hari had nobody but himself.

Uncle Vernon held Hari’s arms tight behind him while Dudley’s fists hit him with a smack, thump, crack.

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Hari is seven when Dudley throws a box of razor blades at Hari’s head, and tells him to kill himself.

“I’m supposed to have a perfect family, but all they care about is how horrid you are. I want you gone.”

“If you don’t kill yourself, I’ll kill you.”

So Hari pulled out a blade while Dudley watched, and carved a line down his wrist.

If only it was that easy to die.

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Hari didn’t notice the first two days when his daily meal wasn’t there. Not that a slice of bread and devon counted as a meal, but it was the only thing he got to eat. He noticed on the third day by the way his stomach seemed to turn itself inside out, a searing, stabbing pain through his abdomen.

He didn’t expect to enjoy the feeling.

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Hari Potter is 10 years old, and has more scars than his school has students. His skin is ashy, the golden tones washed from his body in the combined embrace of isolation and starvation. He has learnt not to stand up too quickly, not to be left in a room alone, how to drink so much water that his stomach swells in the illusion of food. He has learnt to be glad for Dudley’s massive hand-me-downs that obstructs from view his skeletal frame, that shelters the skin hashed and rehashed with precise scars, each scar bigger than the last.

Hari has learnt that there is no Miss Honey, in this world or any other. That Matilda is a story for adults to read and feel good about themselves, to see themselves as Miss Honey, for children to read and feel smart like Matilda. He has no place in that story.

And how Hari wishes he could mourn these lessons, to shed hot tears alone in his cupboard at night, to wash his grief down his face and pool in the hollows of his clavicle. It would seem Hari’s tear ducts shrivelled up alongside the boy he could have been. All that he’s left with is a box of rusting razor blades. If the tears won’t bring relief, then blood will have to substitute.

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Hari’s arms have no bare skin left. The scar tissue has keloided into hideous lumps that turn his arms from being stick-thin, to bloated, gorged on his self-destruction. His thighs follow a similar path. A distant part of his mind wonders what he’ll do when he runs out of skin- there are only so many times an artist can paint over the same canvas.

His teachers can’t pretend they don’t see the hollows in his cheeks, the facial features sharp enough that they fear they might even cut through his face. They can’t pretend they don’t see him giving his sandwich to his cousin every day, see him drinking water in ridiculous amounts. But most of all, they can’t pretend they didn’t see the boy crumple to the floor mid-lesson.

Hari wakes in the nurse’s office, his head pounding, tongue thick and heavy in his mouth, the ceiling’s peeling paint filling his vision, blurred around the edges.

“Your aunt and uncle weren’t able to come. You’ll have to stay here for the rest of the afternoon until they come to pick up Dudley.”

Hari isn’t strong enough to laugh, and the mirthful cough that shakes his frame is enough to drive blades of pain into his shoulder-blades, into his chest. He fades back into the soft embrace of darkness, knowing full well they wouldn’t come for him.

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Hari’s dreams are filled with angry women and crying men, with rapid spellfire and flashes of red hair, with antlers protruding from a mop of hair just like his own. He thinks he’d quite like to be a deer, prancing around, never having to worry about the contradiction he turned his existence into. Free to roll through long grass, to chase butterflies, to trumpet its supremacy over the forest.

The man and woman can’t touch him. Something tells him they’re dead, and he’s not quite there.

Hari wishes he could be.

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Hari receives a letter on his 11th birthday. Not that he knows about it, since he’s locked in his cupboard, too weak to be of use, and far easier to forget. Aunt Petunia sees the vivid emerald ink, and promptly shreds the letter. No more letters are sent.

Nobody ever asks Hari why he’s flirting with death in this intricate dance, no more than anyone asks his aunt and uncle why they keep a child locked in a cupboard. 

Hari likes to lie there, too weak to lift his own hands, and ponder why he’s done this to himself. Why he twisted the clumsy little boy the Dursleys made into a wounded little boy who peeled his own skin back with every slice of a blade, separating skin deep enough to gush blood and heal in massive, ugly lumps. Why he took the meals they forgot to feed him and twisted it into a desperate pursuit of emptiness, of finding the clean purity internally that he never could on the outside. 

Hari had never seen himself in the mirror- he was too short to see in the bathroom mirror, and too afraid of what he’d see to even look. He’d contented himself with slashing and starving, a penance for his existence, a tribute to the Dursleys, a memorial to himself.

They can’t break you if you do it first.

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Hari lay shivering beneath the stairs. His aunt and uncle were at the shops and at work respectively, while Dudley was at school. Hari simply wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed and go to school, and the Dursleys didn’t seem to care. Hari wasn’t entirely sure that they even remembered he was there.

A colossal bang sent his shivers to quaking tremors.

“Hari Potter?”

Hari held his breath.

“Point me” the voice whispered.

The mysterious home invader gasped, a sound of such horror and indignation that Hari felt his tremors deepen, a bone-deep ice settling through his body. Footsteps grew closer, stopping right outside his cupboard.

With a creak of a door that hasn’t been opened in a week or oiled in a decade, a beam of harsh light fell upon Hari’s huddled form, illuminating the bloodsoaked blanket he clung to, the individual vertebrae in his back poking out like spikes towards the invader of his cupboard.

“Oh, Merlin.”

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Hari learnt something new that day. Sometimes, home invaders are a good thing, and come in the form of wizened old women made of iron will and wrinkles, punctuated by horror and tears. Sometimes, nurses do care and can help, and don’t just wrap you up in blankets until your aunt and uncle fail to collect you and you have to sit there while the nurse wonders what you could’ve done wrong to make your family turn their back on you.

Hari learnt that Miss Honeys might not exist, but that Professor McGonogalls and Madam Pomphreys do. He learnt of flashing green and bloody foreheads, of dead parents and criminal godparents, of how the only surefire way to kill someone failed to kill him. Hari learnt, that somehow, he is unable to die.

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Years later, a stunted little boy faces down a slashing green light, armed with a wand of Elder wood, a polished river stone, and Death’s own cloak. He lays down his life for the wizarding world, knowing that the world sees him as some kind of selfless hero, not realising that this, the gentle embrace of death, was what he’d been trying for all along.

When Hari was struck down, the man and the woman were waiting for him. And at long, long last, his parents could hold him close.


End file.
